The Caped Crusader
by Barefoot XO
Summary: Things take a different path after 'The Dark Knight'. After taking the blame for Harvey's death and crimes, Bruce finds himself forced to cope with a truly daunting challenge… playing father to a boy who believes the Batman killed his parents.
1. Collateral Damage

**The Caped Crusader**

I don't own Batman. It belongs to DC comics.

 **Prologue: Collateral Damage**

"The final reports are in, Master Bruce."

Bruce Wayne sighed as he sat down in a chair of the newly rebuilt Wayne Manor. He had hung up his cape and cowl that day. The Joker was behind bars, Two-Face was dead, Harvey Dent was a martyr and Batman was considered a murderer. Bruce winced at the thought. It rankled, deep down, that he was considered a murderer, even though he himself had chosen to make that sacrifice. It hurt to have his creation equated with the monsters who had taken his parents.

"Master Bruce?"

Bruce blinked in shock and glanced up at Alfred, his trusted right hand. "I'm sorry, Alfred. I was a million miles away. What was that?"

The elderly man smiled sympathetically. It had been a trying few days to say the least. "I have the final reports, Sir… on the casualties of Mr. Dent's unfortunate spree. I believe you wanted to know them."

Bruce managed a small smile for his oldest friend and took the reports, curious about who had died in Two-Face's short murder spree. Salvatore Maroni was no great loss. Bruce wouldn't have ever killed Maroni, of course, but he wasn't about to feel much sadness over the passing of a violent mob boss. Michael Wuertz was a corrupt cop. Bruce would have preferred to see the man brought to justice, rather than being gunned down. Wuertz had left behind a wife and kids. Perhaps _Bruce Wayne_ could drum up a charity ball with the proceeds going to the families of policemen killed in the line of duty. Bruce nodded in satisfaction.

It was in that moment that he came across two of Two-Face's victims that made no sense. "Who exactly are John and Mary Grayson and why did Dent kill them?"

Alfred winced faintly. "I'm afraid that Dent killed the two by circumstance, Master Bruce. Their car was struck by Maroni's when Dent killed Maroni's driver. Only their young son and Dent survived the collision."

Bruce's face could have been carved from stone. "Collateral damage." Oh how Bruce hated that term. It was a term used for the unintended consequences of violent actions. It was used by the military, the police and for many organizations. It was an unpleasant reality that occurred more often then people would prefer. Bruce instinctively hated the term. His own broken childhood was collateral damage left behind by Chill's murder of his parents.

"Quite right, Sir." Alfred appeared to be trying to keep a stiff upper lip for Bruce's sake, but it was obvious that the gentleman's gentleman was equally offended by the term and equally distressed to see that Dent's madness had claimed the lives of uninvolved innocents.

Bruce pursed his lips in thought for a long moment. The child the Graysons had left behind had just lost his parents. Bruce found himself wanting to make certain that the boy would be all right. "Alfred, prepare a full background on the surviving Grayson boy. I want everything we've got on him."

Alfred slipped from the room with barely a whisper. The man exemplified efficiency in a way that still impressed Bruce. He had to wonder where his father had ever found such a skilled and adaptable man as Alfred Pennyworth. Bruce quickly dismissed Alfred from his thoughts, getting back to going over the casualties of Dent's rampage. He would think about Alfred and the Grayson boy later.

I know it's short, but I'll give you more next time. ;)

This is obviously my retake on a follow-up to _The Dark Knight_. In _The Dark Knight Rises_ , we discover that Dent is still a hero, Batman is AWOL, Bruce is a recluse and many other things. In _The Caped Crusader_ , I intend to present Bruce with a different path.

Jasper


	2. The End of His World

I don't own Batman. He belongs to DC Comics. I also don't own The Hollow Men. It belongs to T.S. Eliot.

I am not bashing T.S. Eliot. The character is reacting irrationally to words that were never meant to describe his situation.

* * *

 **Chapter II: The End of His World**

 _This is the way the world ends_

 _Not with a bang but a whimper._

Dick Grayson was a surprisingly good student, when you considered that the boy was a traveling circus acrobat, and was raised by the same. At a mere twelve years old, the boy was actually quite advanced for his age group. The fact of the matter is that Child Protective Services were much less willing to trust that traveling circus folk to educate their child properly. Thankfully, the constant travel of life on the road had allowed the Graysons a lot of time to actually keep their son well ahead of the curve. Dick wasn't a genius by most standards, but he was well above average and very well read for his age.

Dick glanced at the book of poems before him once more, focusing a heated glare on the last words that he had read before a careening limo had brought his life to a crashing halt.

 _This is the way the world ends…_ Oh how Dick hated those words. He wanted to travel back in time and make T.S. Eliot stop writing, just so that he wouldn't have read those words, as if the lack of that act might have stopped _his_ world from ending with a whimper… The whimper of pain his mother had given out before she had followed her husband, who had died on impact, into death.

The crash that had killed Dick's parents had occurred two weeks ago. Since then, the local G.C.P.D. had been working to find a place for young Dick Grayson to live. The cops that were handling his case were reluctant to turn him over to Gotham's local office of C.P.S. There were a lot of question marks lingering over that organization, question marks that had even the often obtuse Gotham P.D. suspecting them of human trafficking. The problem was that Dick didn't have many other options. His parents were dead, and both of them had no other living family. Charles Haly, of Haly's Circus, had been sympathetic, but really unable to take on raising a young boy in addition to running his circus. All of this served to leave Dick at loose ends while the cops struggled to find a palatable alternative and, as usual, fail miserably.

His time waiting at the police station had not been entirely useless, however. It was during that frustrating time that Dick had managed to overhear who it was that was being blamed for his parents' deaths. While Salvatore Maroni, a local gangster, had been the owner of the limo and had died in the crash, it was the death of Maroni's driver that had caused the crash in the first place.

To Dick's utter shock, the death of his parents was being attributed to Batman. Ice seemed to fill his gut at the very idea. Batman had apparently been attempting to Maroni's criminal empire by cutting off its head. The idea was all too believable when you considered the way Batman had apparently been trying to bring down organized crime in Gotham.

Dick didn't really care about Maroni's death. Maroni was a criminal and had therefore been asking for trouble. Dick's parents, however… They had just been there. They weren't criminals who were messing up Gotham. They were circus performers, working to spread joy and fun. It simply drove Dick up the wall that Batman could possibly have killed his parents. In the moments following his discovery of his parents' murderer, Dick swore an oath to himself that he would bring the Batman to account for his crimes.

"Richard Grayson?"

Dick tore himself from his grief and his plots long enough to notice a well dressed man standing across from him in the police station. He had even heard the man enter. Dick frowned in irritation. "It's Dick."

The man nodded agreeably and asked if he could sit down. Not really caring, Dick simply answered with a shrug. The man apparently took the shrug as a positive, or at least not a negative, and sat down next to the boy. "It never really leaves you…"

Dick blinked in confusion. "What never really leaves you?"

The man offered up an unhappy smile. "The anger… the rage… the bitter certainty that there was nothing that you could have done… the hopeless wish that there _was_ something that you could have done… Any or all of those, really. The only thing that really goes away is the immediacy of your pain. That will dull a bit with time." The man's smile perked up a bit. "The certainty that your parents loved you never goes away either…"

Dick snorted in disgust. "The last thing I need is another shrink." He'd had his fill of those in the past weeks. That was certain. "What do you know about it, anyway?"

The man's smile faltered. "I was a few years younger than you when my parents were gunned down by a trigger-happy mugger. Trust me when I say that I know a bit of how you feel."

It was then that Dick recognized the man. He was Bruce Wayne. While the death of Wayne's parents had occurred before Dick was born, their deaths were still well remembered in Gotham. If anyone could understand Dick's pain at losing his parents to the senseless violence of Gotham's underbelly, it was Bruce Wayne, and yet… "Your parents were killed by a bad guy. The man who killed my parents was supposed to be a hero."

Bruce looked extremely uncomfortable. "Yes… Your parents' killer was supposed to be a hero. I was sorry to see that he had let this city down so badly. The people he murdered… Most of them were very bad people, but even they deserved to face justice. It's unfortunate that he forgot that."

Dick bowed his head as his grief and his inability to equate such a hero as Batman with a killer went to war again. "One day I'm going to bring him in. One day I'm going to make Batman pay for my parents."

Bruce seemed to start in shock, which was silly since they had just been talking about him. Why would Wayne be surprised to be talking about what they were talking about? Dick mentally shrugged the thought away. Adults were weird. "One day I'm going to be the hero he should have been."

Bruce smiled once more, seeming to have thrown off his weird shock. "It's as good a career goal as any. Still, if you choose to stick to acrobatics, I'll support you. You can be anything you want to be, Dick."

Dick stared at the older man suspiciously. "What have you got to do with it?"

Wayne shrugged mysteriously. "Let's just say I have an in with Gotham's police department and the local C.P.S. I've asked to be allowed to make you my ward, rather then sending you to a foster home. Gotham's foster system is decidedly…"

"Evil?"

Bruce snorted at that. "I wouldn't go that far. There are plenty of good people there that are overworked and underfunded, despite what help I've attempted to offer. Unfortunately, like most of Gotham, there are also some rather shady characters that make things there rather dangerous." The man was silent for a long moment. "When my parents died, an old family retainer stepped in to protect me from being exploited. I'd like to maybe do the same thing for you…"

Dick stared for a long time at the man, attempting to gauge how much he could trust him. The circus, while a true joy of his childhood, had taught him to be wary. Finally he hesitantly held out a hand. "I'm Dick Grayson. Pleased to meet you."

Bruce grinned at him, taking the offered hand and shaking it. "I'm Bruce Wayne. It's nice to meet you too, Dick."

* * *

Okay… A few things:

Firstly, I know that the things Bruce tells Dick are almost certainly psychologically unsound and probably rather bad. The fact is, though, that Bruce is not a trained psychiatrist, nor is he a particularly psychologically sound individual…

Also, for those who missed it, Bruce was speaking of Harvey Dent, not Batman. That's why he was so shocked when Dick brought up Batman. He knows that Batman has taken the blame and he accepts that, but he also still mentally associates the crimes with the actually criminal, Harvey Dent.

Hope the update was worth the wait,

Jasper


End file.
